Financial Setbacks

The Daily Reckoning discusses Financial Setbacks:

The period 1980-2007 has seen more economic growth than any other period ever. More cars, more televisions, more highways, more hotels, more concrete, more Internet connections…just about more of everything was produced than in any similar 27-year period in history. In other terms, more money was invested and earned than ever before. And more people added more to their wealth than ever too.

The condition precedent for this explosion of wealth was that the world turned away from political change…towards market change. To the largest nation in the world, Deng Tsou Ping announced, 'to get rich was glorious.' All of a sudden, a billion people were bussing, humping, and schlepping - not to build a proletariat paradise, but to make money. To the north, the Soviet Union was never defeated…it simply fell apart, crushed by the weight of its own central planning. By the end of the '80s, it too pronounced itself in favor of making money. And by the early 2000s, Moscow was the most expensive city in the world…with so many millionaires its politicians couldn't shake them down fast enough.

Meanwhile, in Britain and America there were soft revolutions too. Maggie Thatcher and Ronald Reagan ushered in a new era where money and market solutions were said to be the cure for almost every problem. Regulations were eased or scrapped altogether. Marginal tax rates were cut. The 'spirit of enterprise,' as Reagan quoted writer George Gilder, would make us all rich. Those who could innovate would create new wealth. Those whom the spirit of enterprise did not touch directly could buy mutual funds. The market was the source of wealth. All you had to do was to be 'in the market' and you would get rich.

And yet we are on the descent into an economic depression. We have forgotten that wealth is created through human labour, nothing else. This will be a hard lesson to learn. There is no other way to wealth.

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Fear, hope and love: the three marketing levers

Seth Godin discusses Fear, hope and love: the three marketing levers.

He concludes:

I don't think love is often a one way street, either. Brands that are loved usually start the process by loving their customers in advance.

The easiest way to build a brand is to sell fear. The best way, though, may be to deliver on hope while aiming for love...

One of the problems for Communists is that Anti-Communism has been built on fear: fear of the gulags; fear of property confiscation; fear of being subject to the collective. And this campaign of fear is still remarkably effective.

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Origin of the Specious

In an attempt to show up the motivations behind the current wave of religious funamentalism, Reason Magazine discovers Origin of the Specious:

Political scientist Shadia Drury, a passionate critic of Strauss, puts it this way: 'For Strauss, the ills of modernity have their source in the foolish belief that there are no harmless truths, and that belief in God and in rewards and punishments is not necessary for political order....[H]e is convinced that religion is necessary for the well-being of society. But to state publicly that religion is a necessary fiction would destroy any salutary effect it might have. The latter depends on its being believed to be true....If the vulgar discovered, as the philosophers have always known, that God is dead, they might behave as if all is permitted.'

Thus, to preserve society, wise people must publicly support the traditions and myths that sustain the political order and that encourage ordinary people to obey the laws and live justly. People will do so only if they believe that moral rules are divinely decreed or were set up by men who were inspired by the Divine.

Kristol restated this insight nearly five decades ago in an essay in Commentary dealing with Freud: 'If God does not exist, and if religion is an illusion that the majority of men cannot live without...let men believe in the lies of religion since they cannot do without them, and let then a handful of sages, who know the truth and can live with it, keep it among themselves. Men are then divided into the wise and the foolish, the philosophers and the common men, and atheism becomes a guarded, esoteric doctrine--for if the illusions of religion were to be discredited, there is no telling with what madness men would be seized, with what uncontrollable anguish.'

Emphasis Mine

Here, the emphasis is on religion as a tool of social control, not as personal choice. This utility alone makes it desirable to the Capitalists as they enjoin us to defer our satisfaction to the after-life.

Marx expressed a contrary idea that:

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people

Karl Marx: Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in: Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, February, 1844

Here, we have a clash of two contrary ideas in how to approach religion: social control; or acknowledgement of suffering. The rulers want the social control without acknowledging the suffering.

Marxists today should approach religion as a personal choice not as a tool of social control. We should not seek to obliterate religion but as to acknowledge a person's fundamental right to religious expression.

Atheism should not be seen as a sign of intellectual superiority either to be hidden from the sea of believers, or to be flaunted in front of them to condemn their ignorance.

For me, I choose to remain a Catholic in spite of the Church's official persecution of Communists. Although, I have been treated with benign indifference by the local Catholic community. This counts as tolerance.

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Is the Tipping Point Toast?

The Tipping Point purported to show that a few key individuals could literally change the world by starting trends that rapidly spread throughout the population. However, Duncan Watts thinks this case is overstated. He asks if Is the Tipping Point Toast?:

In their hunt for a practical way to create maximum exposure for any given ad, Watts and Peretti developed a way to marry the benefits of old-school mass marketing with clever six-degrees effects. Their first test case came when the Brady Campaign, the gun-control group, asked for help with an online petition.

Watts and Peretti set up a regular mass-market ad buy, running banner ads on several prominent blogs and news sites. Like many ads these days, they added a button on the ad that allows people to forward the ad to a friend--a way of collecting eyeballs for free. Typically, people ignore this 'share with your friends' pitch. But Watts and Peretti included technology called ForwardTrack, which displays the route the ad travels once you've forwarded it. This turned ad forwarding into a piece of social cartography. People would pass the ad specifically to those friends most likely to keep it moving. It became a Facebook-like contest to sign up the most friends.

The technique marries Watts's two main epiphanies: Cascades require word-of-mouth effects, so you need to build a six-degrees effect into an ad campaign; but since you can never know which person is going to spark the fire, you should aim the ad at as broad a market as possible--and not waste money chasing 'important' people. And it worked. The pass-around effect doubled the number of people who saw the Brady Campaign's ad. They paid for 22,582 hits and received an additional 31,590 for free. Another campaign they ran for the Oxygen network quadrupled the audience size, adding 23,544 hits to the initial 7,064.

Neither was, technically, a viral hit. Neither passed the disease threshold, where the meme spreads exponentially and engulfs the mainstream. "But you can double your impact, which is still pretty good," Watts says.

The ultimate irony of Watts's research is that, if you really buy it, the most effective way to pitch your idea is ... mass marketing. And that is precisely what the wizards of Madison Avenue, presiding over our zillion-channel microniche market, have rejected as obsolete. "But that's the thing about magic," says Watts. "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is."

Emphasis Mine

For us Communists, the message is that the mass-marketing of selling the party newspaper and mass rallies is still important.

There are no short-cuts: no magic viral marketing campaign waiting to be unleashed once get to the right people. The tipping point is just an anarchist pipe-dream of an influential event that triggers a magical transformation of society. People can be panicked for a time but then revert to old habits.

As the evangelists keep pointing out, change starts from the heart and moves outward into the world.

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